It'd Probably Have Been Easier
by Lucillia
Summary: If Young Obito had been a bit less like him. But hey, at least he got to say that he'd pranked his father.
1. You're the Guy Who

_It'd probably be easier if he'd actually been evil when he was thirteen._ Naruto thought as he once again pocketed his kunai before Obito could see it.

He hadn't meant to travel back in time, but when he'd found himself in the past, back more than a year before he was born, he'd decided to take the opportunity to fix things so they didn't play out the way they had when he was growing up. The easiest way to fix things would of course be to off Obito since just about everything including the deaths of his parents came back to him.

The problem was, well, there had been a reason that Kakashi had once called him Obito when he'd been blind stinking drunk back during those infamous days when he was sensei of Team 7 before Sasuke had defected.

It had taken the team less than two weeks to realize that, despite passing them, Kakashi hadn't wanted a team in the first place. By that point, they had pretty much been resigned to training themselves. There had been some hope that Kakashi had warmed up to them during that cock up in Wave, but by the time the Chunin Exams had rolled around, things had gone back to normal. He and Sasuke had been fighting all the time, and Kakashi had shown up to provide the minimum required amount of adult supervision. If he hadn't learned later that Kakashi had made some sort of arrangement with Jiraiya, he would have been a great deal more pissed at the man for going off and training Sasuke instead of him during that Chunin Exam debacle, as he had been until Ero-senin had informed him of the arrangements he and Kakashi-sensei had made.

Of course after he'd gotten Sasuke's interrogation transcripts and learned that Kakashi's idea of training had included dog treats and a rolled up newspaper, he'd been damn glad that it hadn't been him who'd been dragged away for a month of one-on-one training...

Finding Obito when he'd realized where and when he was had been surprisingly easy. All he'd had to do was follow the yells of "Not the face! Not the face!" to a tree where he'd been forced to rescue the boy from a cat.

Obito had been understandably grateful about being saved from being shredded by what had to be Tora's father by someone who didn't laugh at him or ridicule him or put him down for needing to be rescued, and if it were a decade and a half later, the Konohamaru Corps would have gained a new member then and there. As it was, Naruto found himself being dragged to Obito's house for dinner after a number of questions asked by the boy had revealed that he didn't have any money on him, nor did he have a place to stay.

He had pulled out a weapon on the way to Obito's place twice, only for the boy to say something that reminded him so much of himself that it hurt, and twice he had put the weapon back in his pocket unused. He knew that if it were anyone else in his place, they would have long since killed Obito for the good of all and dumped his body in an alley somewhere, but he just couldn't do it. Instead, he just trudged along behind Obito and put up with the suspicious stares that followed him, especially when they'd ended up in what appeared to be Uchiha Central.

After walking through the village for a good long while, Obito had led him to a nondescript house in the old Uchiha neighborhood. Once inside, Obito introduced him to his parents. For some strange reason, Obito's father seemed familiar to him, though he couldn't put his finger on why, especially since Obito bore a striking resemblance to his mother. Obito's parents, being shinobi, and this being a time of war, and him being a complete stranger, were naturally wary. Throughout the entire evening, they had not so subtly tried to interrogate him. If they'd tried to drug his dinner with a truth-serum or something, he hadn't noticed. Kurama always took care of crap like that.

It was after dinner that he was finally able to place where he knew Obito's father from.

"Hey!" he said in the middle of a nice calm after-dinner discussion about nothing in particular from which he would be unable to gain any useful intel were he an enemy ninja. "You're the guy who helped me glitter-bomb the police station!"

Obito's father was naturally taken aback by the sudden declaration.

"I...huh?" the man said intelligently.

"Nevermind. Forget I said anything." he said quickly. He'd avoided mentioning that he was from the future so far, and he had a feeling that he should continue doing so.

"What's this about my dad glitter-bombing the police station?" Obito asked, looking at him strangely.

"Nothing. It was a dream I had a week ago." he replied.

"So," Obito's father said. "Tell us about this dream."

Eh, what the hell. The conversation they'd been having was boring anyways.

"Well," he started. "I was seven, and it was the middle of winter or something, and I was wandering around the village because I didn't have anything else to do and the new apartment was really quiet, and it was getting to me, so I went out. After playing in the park for a few hours, I got cold, so I headed to where there were lights so I could get warm. I was sitting outside of a bar when the old guy who looked like you tripped over me. Instead of yelling at me like most people would, he apologized and helped me up. He walked me back to my apartment because he wanted words with my guardians for letting me stay out so late, and when we got back to my apartment, he learned that I lived alone."

"Then what happened?" Obito asked.

"The man told me to go to bed because a kid my age should be asleep at that hour. When I got into bed, he sat down on the end of the bed and turned on the t.v.. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me to shut-up and go to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, the old guy was making breakfast. After breakfast, we headed over to his place where his stuff had been thrown on the lawn and there was some lady screaming at him through the window about how if he wanted some place to stay, he could move in with his new girlfriend." he continued, noting the odd look on Obito's mother's face.

"The man picked up his stuff, said something about "of all days for this to happen" and then said something about me needing looking after before he led me back to my apartment and started putting his stuff away in my closet. It was when he started taking over my new training room that he found my plans for a prank on the police." he continued, noticing how Obito had snickered at the mention of pranking the police.

"So, why didn't he turn you over to them when he found the plans?" Obito's father asked.

"Dunno, he was weird. Said his kid would've loved me. I think that's why he bought me the goggles for his kid's birthday. When we were working on the plans for glitter-bombing the station, he said he was sad that he never got to do this kind of stuff with his kid, and then it was too late, and that if I ever had kids I should take time out of my day to be there for them because I'd just end up regretting it if I didn't." he said, remembering the man he'd all but forgotten in the years since the massacre because he'd pushed the memories of him in the "painful" file and refused to look at them again until he'd seen the man in the flesh once more.

Obito's father's eyes flashed with anger, and Obito's mother paled slightly when he said this.

"What happened next?" Obito asked, trying to break the mood.

"Well, the man helped me pay for the orange glitter, 'cause orange is awesome, and made a bunch of glue tags, and about a week after he moved in, we hit the station with them and got arrested. You should've seen that Fugaku Police Chief guy's face when they were arresting us, he looked like he was about to have a heart-attack or something-ttebayo." he said, happy to move on to a happier memory.

Obito blinked just like he did every time he said "Dattebayo".

"So, what happened after that?" Obito asked.

"Well, the Fugaku Police Chief guy screamed at the old guy for like three hours straight before the Old Man came to bail me out. Old Man Hokage asked me a bunch of weird questions, and had a doctor look at me, which got the Fugaku guy even angrier for some strange reason. Then one of the ANBU guys brought the old guy's stuff over, and Old Man Hokage said that the old guy wasn't allowed to visit anymore, and that anything he might've told me about my parents wasn't true, which was funny because the old guy never said anything about my parents." he said, finishing the story.

He'd never seen the man again after that, and then several months later, that whole massacre thing happened. Now that he was seeing a past version of the man, a better kept past version of the man, it was bringing back memories that were fun, painful, and confusing as well.

"Well, that was...an interesting dream." Obito's mother finally said.

"I do believe that it is Obito's bedtime." Obito's mother said, as she looked up at the clock on the wall.

"Can Naruto come with me?" Obito begged.

Obito's father made a face at this, and he could guess why. He was about five years older than Obito was now, and the man didn't know who the hell he was. He knew that perverts came in all stripes, and that parents had to be on the look out for all sorts for the safety of their children, and often saw them when they weren't there, but...

"I'll leave the door open." he said.

"Fine." Obito's father said, giving him a dark look.


	2. Honesty Sometimes Isn't the Best Policy

He got up out of his chair an instant after Obito had his, and followed Obito back to his bedroom. When he got there, his jaw dropped in shock. The word slob didn't even begin to cover what Obito was. There was stuff scattered on every available surface in the boy's room including the bed and the floor. His clean clothes were haphazardly hanging out of his dresser, and a wide variety of things were sticking up out of his desk drawers. He wasn't sure, but the room could have been a literal minefield, considering the explosive tag he saw sticking out of Obito's pile of dirty clothes.

"...An' that's my snake Orochimaru, an' that's my soda bottle full of spit, an'..." Obito was saying as he gave him the grand tour of the room, pointing out several items including a terrarium on which a number of books had been stacked, and the aforementioned bottle of spit.

"Why do you have a soda bottle full of spit?" he asked.

"Dunno. Seemed like a good idea at the time." Obito said with a shrug.

He didn't know how the hell Obito had managed it, but somehow, when it was time to go to sleep, the boy had cleared enough space to lay out a spare futon for him. Obito fell asleep the instant his head hit his pillow, but the same couldn't be said for him. He'd nearly killed the boy three times during the night, but as he watched him sleep peacefully, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Obito's father had peeked in on them twice during the night, and he'd made sure that he was in bed and looked like he was asleep both times.

He honestly couldn't remember if he'd actually liked the man or not. Sure, the man had bought him his goggles, helped him prank the police, and tried to look after him, but there had been something off about him. The man had been very pushy from day one, had never actually asked if he could move in, and had started taking over his apartment the instant he did so. Obito's father couldn't cook worth crap either.

Sometime shortly before sunup, he'd managed to doze off for a bit. When he snapped back awake at the sound of Obito getting up, he found himself looking straight at Obito's bottle of spit. Despite the fact that he'd mostly sworn off pranks years ago, he found himself getting an idea.

Forgiven didn't mean forgotten after all, and he owed the man...

Smirking, he waited for Obito to head into the toilet, and grabbed the bottle which he brought downstairs where Obito's mom was cooking breakfast.

When he got downstairs, he checked the fridge. He found exactly what he was looking for inside the door.

"Hey, Obito's mom?" he said.

"Yes?" the woman who didn't look to happy to have him as a guest asked.

"Can I have one of these, a funnel, and some food coloring?" he asked as he pointed to one of the bottles of a popular brightly-colored non-carbonated beverage.

"Sure." the woman said with a smile that wasn't quite as welcoming as she tried to make it.

He gathered his supplies, chugged down the drink, and while she watched, he poured the bottle of spit into the juice bottle he'd just emptied and dyed it to match the drink it had previously contained.

When he'd popped the lid back on and re-did the safety seal, Obito came into the kitchen saying "Hey Naruto, have you seen my bottle of, er..."

"I dumped it out." he said, giving the boy an innocent look as he stuffed the new spit bottle into his jacket.

At the breakfast table, both he and Obito choked on their rice when Obito's mother turned to him and said "Naruto, was there any particular reason why you were standing over my son's bed holding a kunai last night?"

"Honestly?" he said. "The kid's like some weird cross between me and the bastard who was responsible for my parents deaths, tried to raze my village on multiple occasions, and who had tried to break the world. Part of me thinks that the world would be better off if I were to kill him here and now, and another part of me thinks that if someone provided him with the proper guidance, he could turn out like me rather than like that bastard who killed thousands of people and tried to kill me to fulfill some whacked out world domination plot."

All three members of Obito's family stared at him open-mouthed, their chopsticks varying distances from their rice bowls.

Realizing what he'd just said, he winced. He wasn't that good a liar, but honesty probably hadn't been the right choice in this instance.

"Uh, er..." he started, "Would it be possible for you to forget I said that?"

The three of them blinked as their brains rebooted.

"I can't believe I let you stay here!" Obito yelled angrily.

"Yeah, thanks for that by the way." he said, before wincing at how that probably sounded. Sakura would probably have hit him right about now were she here.

After a decidedly awkward breakfast, he decided to leave the house before Obito's parents decided to kill him, and to follow Obito out to the training grounds where the rest of Team Minato would undoubtedly be located. Obito hadn't taken too kindly to his following him, and blew up at him any number of times. In the middle of the marketplace, the boy called him any number of names, and accused him of being an Iwa spy.

That had naturally led to him being surrounded and questioned. He was patted down, and had all his belongings taken off of his person, including his wallet which one of the Uchiha police was flipping through with a look of incredulity.

He turned red as the officer pulled the condom out of his wallet while another shinobi tested the contents of the juice bottle. Jiraiya had once told him a man should always have a condom in their wallet just in case. He himself never really knew what the just in case was for, because in all his eighteen years, he'd never actually had cause to use one. He still kept one in his wallet because Ero-senin told him to though.

"Not poisoned." the man who had been testing the juice bottle said. "It doesn't appear to have any explosive properties either."

"Nice ID." the police officer said as he stuffed the condom back into the wallet and handed it back to him, as the two other ninja handed his belongings back.

"Obito." the officer said to the teen who was still there watching him being questioned. "How many times have you been told not to accuse random people of being spies?"

"But..." Obito started.

"But what?" the officer asked.

"But he tried to kill me!" Obito yelled.

"Did you?" the officer asked.

"No, but I thought about it a few times." he replied honestly.

"So have we all." the officer muttered under his breath.

He was soon let go, and Obito turned away from him with a scowl. As he followed the boy to a familiar training ground, he thought he felt someone following him, someone familiar, though he couldn't quite place who it was.

"Sorry I'm late." Obito grumbled when he reached his team who had been waiting for him much like everyone waited for Kakashi. "I caught a spy, and they let him go."

"And, who are you?" Namikaze Minato asked when he caught sight of him approaching the training field that made him wonder if Kakashi was a masochist or something considering the number of training grounds they could have taken instead of this one back during the days of Team 7.

"The name's Naruto, and I was wondering if I could watch." he replied.

The man's eyes narrowed, and he frowned, and there was a moment when he wondered if his father remembered him from the last time he'd been time traveling despite the fact that he'd said that he'd forget him in order to preserve the timeline and ensure his birth.

A couple hours into the training, as the team took a break, and Obito had fallen to the ground panting along with Rin, and Minato sat down against a tree, he smiled and said "Hey do you want some juice?" as he held out a certain bottle to his father.

"Thanks." his father said as he examined the bottle that had been tested by the ninja who had caught him.

"Yeah," he said. "The Uchiha were being overly-cautious when Obito started yelling that I was a spy or something."

Minato shrugged and unscrewed the lid of the bottle.


	3. What'd I Miss?

The look on the future Yondaime's face when he started to realize that there was something off about the contents of the bottle that he'd been chugging down had been absolutely priceless. A second later, the man was on all fours, hacking and spitting out what he just drank. The look in the man's eyes started out shocked and hurt and then turned positively venomous, but Naruto couldn't bring himself to care.

_That's what you get for sealing the Kyuubi into your own son jackass._ Naruto thought somewhat vindictively as he watched his father choke and spit. While he was mostly about sweetness, light, and eternal friendship, he wasn't above the occasional act of vengeance as long is it didn't permanently harm anybody. And, as he thought about it over the years, that one punch hadn't quite been enough.

It took Obito all of five seconds to realize what had happened.

"You didn't." Obito said flatly, not quite able to believe that what had happened had actually happened. "You didn't."

"What did sensei ever do to you?" Rin asked, as she watched his father frantically scrape his mouth out.

"Long story, and frankly I don't want to go into it right now." he replied with a shrug as he watched his father's antics.

"I'm afraid you'll have to." the ANBU that had snuck up behind him said in a tone that was apparently meant to be menacing. "We don't appreciate strangers trying to injure our ninja, and are willing to do whatever it takes to find out why."

"Then, you'll have to put a twenty-year seal on our conversation, or you won't get one word out of me." he replied, crossing his arms stubbornly. He'd dealt with ANBU often enough of the years that he wasn't intimidated by them like normal people were.

Minato, who was just beginning to recover from his little ordeal, frowned at this and whirled to face him.

"Does this have anything to do with the temporal incident I was involved in a few years back?" he asked.

He paused, wondering how or even if he should answer that question, remembering that time he'd met his father when he'd accidentally ended up about twenty years in the past.

"Eh, sorta." he said as the ANBU handcuffed him and started to lead him away.

"What temporal incident was that sensei?" Obito asked his sensei as he watched the ANBU lead the bastard who had tricked his sensei into drinking the contents of his spit bottle away.

"Back when it was just Kakashi and I on the team, we were involved in a temporal incident that we forced ourselves to forget in order to preserve the integrity of the timeline." Minato-sensei replied as he watched the Naruto bastard who apparently had something against him considering what he'd just done depart.

Shortly after that, a rather pensive Minato, who had been tricked into drinking a week's worth of Obito's spit by someone from the future, released the team from their training and sent them off to do whatever. Obito chose to wander around, rather than face the disapproval he'd undoubtedly have to face when he got back to his neighborhood. He rescued two cats that thankfully didn't try to turn him into human sashimi, and helped an old lady carry her groceries home, and listened to war stories that were being told by an old man who turned out to have been a veteran of the Clan Wars.

Eventually though, it got dark and it was time to head home for dinner or otherwise get chewed out by his parents for not doing so since he wasn't on a mission. When he got home, one of the ANBU who had led Naruto away was there asking his parents questions. When the ANBU caught sight of him, he just sorta stared at him. It wasn't a good stare either. It was almost as if he were trying to size up a potential enemy.

"What?" he asked, trying to make that man stop staring at him, because it was making him uncomfortable, and frankly freaking him the hell out.

"...Nothing." the ANBU said, still staring at him.

"I'm going to my room." he muttered as he turned and left.

He headed to his room and shut the door three-quarters of the way.

He swiftly grew bored with listening to the conversation that was going on between his parents and the ANBU. The guy was just asking a bunch of stupid questions about that Naruto jerk like "How did he move when he said that?" and "Was that exactly what he had said?".

He'd thought he'd been a good judge of character, and in this case he turned out not to be. He'd let that Naruto bastard stay in his room and eat his family's food, and how did he repay him? He tried to kill him, and he fed Minato-sensei a bottle of spit.

A couple hours later, he fell asleep to the sound of the ANBU who had stared at him asking his parents inane questions, and his parents answering them. The next morning, when he awoke, the ANBU had left, but his parents had been giving him strange looks over breakfast.

"What?" he asked.

His father just turned away from him and focused on his food the way he did when he was disappointed in him and didn't want to speak to him because he knew he'd just yell at him or something.

"What did that ANBU guy say to you?" he asked, figuring that it had to have been something that ANBU jerk had did that caused this, considering the way he'd been staring at him last night, and considering that he'd been on good terms with his parents yesterday morning, aside from that mild rebuke over his bringing a stranger into the house.

"Nothing." his mother said quietly as she studied him as if she had never seen him before.

The week following that was strained to say the least. On the home front, his parents wouldn't stop looking at him as if he were a stranger living under their roof, and when it came to training, well, Minato-sensei had learned that it had been his spit and gave him hell for it. Sure, Minato-sensei was pretending he was being nice about it, but he hadn't had so many one-on-one training sessions with his sensei in...ever. That, and he hadn't sparred with his sensei to the point that he was coming home battered, bruised, and aching all over before that week.

At the end of the week, Minato-sensei made an announcement. Apparently, they were going to be seeing Naruto off before he went into stasis for like the next twenty years, since they couldn't think of another way to get him home. He honestly couldn't think of why they would do that, considering what a jerk Naruto had been while he'd been here.

All too soon, they were standing in front of the whisker-cheeked blond teen who had smirked at Minato-sensei, smiled at Kakashi in a manner that could be described as fond, gave Rin an indifferent look as if she was a stranger he'd never met before, and scowled at him.

"Well, goodbye then." Naruto said.

Minato-sensei smiled at the blond, and then moved in for a handshake which he thought was rather big of his sensei, and made him a much better man than he'd ever be. When his sensei was less than a foot away from Naruto however, he socked him in the stomach instead, surprising all of them, the Naruto jerk most especially.

"What was that for dattebayo?" the Naruto jerk asked, looking hurt and sounding slightly winded.

Minato-sensei blinked, and paused in his walking away from Naruto before suddenly turning and staring at him. "Oh my god!" Rin said, staring at the Naruto jerk with wide eyes. Kakashi's jaw dropped behind his mask. He however was just standing there wondering what he'd just missed.

"L-Let's go." Minato-sensei finally said, before turning and leading the team out of the room.

"What did I miss?" he asked as they departed. "What'd I miss?"


	4. Things Reach an End

_They dug for most of a day and a night, when they reached the bottom of the hole, there was a gasp of shock, and a cry of pain and anguish..._

Tobi frowned when he noticed that there didn't seem to be any guards around the cave in which Kushina was to give birth. If he hadn't heard people inside, and felt Minato-sensei's presence, he would have been willing to swear it was a trap. But, who would know enough to trap him now when he was so close to his goal?

Feeling more apprehensive than he had been previously, he made his way into the cave. When he'd caught sight of that squalling thing that had just come out of Kushina's...crotch, several things fell into place.

He knew that he should have remained silent, and that he should have not alerted his former sensei to his presence until he had a hostage with which to catch him off guard and drive him off balance, but...

"Its name is Naruto isn't it." he said as he looked down at the tiny whisker-cheeked blond that the Sandaime's wife was cleaning.

His former sensei looked up at him in startlement, his eyes widened with shock.

"...Yes." the man eventually said, almost hesitantly.

As he stood there looking at the baby, he knew that no matter how far he got, he would fail. Naruto had survived. Naruto had survived, gone back to the past, come face to face with the man who had caused a great deal of suffering in his life, who had killed his parents tonight, on this the night he had been born, and found himself unable to kill him because he had seen himself in him.

Madara-sama was dead, but...no, his plans wouldn't live on.

His former sensei cautiously approached him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"You...You haven't killed anyone yet have you?" his former sensei asked.

"No." he replied as he stared down at the baby who had grown up to be a young man who had been unable to kill him despite the fact that he'd apparently tried to kill him amongst any number of other crimes.

But...Rin had died, and for that, the world, the world where Rin no-longer existed, deserved to burn and be replaced with the world as it should be, the world he and Madara-sama would create if he could find a way around his failures, even if it meant destroying the infant in front of him.

He grabbed one of his kunai from the pouch at his side, and lunged forward to deal with the small obstacle in front of him only to find that he couldn't move.

"I was afraid it would come to this." his former sensei said sadly as he was led off by the members of the Hokage's personal guard.

**Seven Years and Some-odd Months Later:**

"Hey dad." Obito said as he stood next to the door of his father's study.

It had taken him a great deal of time to get past the mind-fuckery that Madara had put him through in the year between when he'd been captured by the man, and when the old bastard had died leaving him to fulfill his insane plans. He had good days, and bad days, but his family and the few friends he had left including Kakashi and Minato-sensei had helped him pull through. Today had been a good day. It had also been his twenty-second birthday, which had reminded him of something.

"What?" his father asked, looking up from the origami pig he was making.

"I was wondering if you wanted to help me help Naruto glitter-bomb the police station." he replied, having remembered the story about the "dream" that the Future Naruto had told them the time he'd stayed the night.

His father had unbent a bit over the last few years, but he wasn't quite sure the man was at the glitter-bombing the police station stage yet. He had to ask though. Fortunately, Now Naruto had parents to live with, so it wasn't like his dad would do something crazy like move in with the kid.

"Sure." his father, who had been using ryo notes to make the little origami piggies for some strange reason replied with an evil smirk that would be more at home on Future Naruto's face.

"Fine me for loitering will they..." his father grumbled under his breath as he made a final fold on one of his ryo note pigs as he left the room slightly freaked out by his father's uncharacteristic smile.

**Eleven Years and Some-odd Months after that:**

Naruto yawned and stretched as he awoke, idly noting that his stomach was a bit sore from where his father had socked him in retaliation for that prank he'd pulled before he'd been put in stasis. Kurama was great at healing injuries that would otherwise be fatal, but he never really bothered with the minor bruises.

The first thing he noticed when he fully woke up was the man in the swirly orange mask that had haunted his nightmares for years.

"Rise and shine Naruto-kun." Tobi said.

To his dying day, he would swear that he had most definitely not shrieked like a little girl.

Rather than attacking him, Tobi had taken his mask off and started laughing like a hyena.

"Man," Tobi choked out between laughs "You should have seen the look on your face!"

It was at that moment that a Genjutsu dropped revealing several people where a wall had once been. Two of those people were Obito's parents, or at least he thought they were. Two of those people had been his parents. One of those people had been Kakashi who was holding a video camera, and one of them looked just like him.

"Next time, you'll think twice about tricking your father into drinking spit." Namikaze Minato said, smiling down at him.

"Next time you'll think twice about sealing the Kyuubi in your kid!" he shot back, even though part of him knew that since his father and two of him were in existence as well as a pair of Uchiha who should be dead, he'd managed to screw the timeline sideways.

"Do the what to what now?" his father said, looking somewhat gobsmacked.

He replied by lifting his shirt and funneling Chakra through his seal, making it visible.

"Oh...shit." Tobi said as he and the rest of the group stared at the seal in absolute horror.


End file.
